Cooking with Linux

This month, Cooking with Linux jogs your memory with a look at the history of Linux. Or, at least, that's how we remember it...

Now, those were the days.

This list could go on and on, but I believe to have made my
point by now. As a matter of fact, most Linux users won't remember
those important milestones of Linux development such as, oh, the
introduction of the VFS layer, the original implementation of
shared libraries, and the first version of the Extended Filesystem.
But let sleeping dogs lie.

If this brief excursion into the dark annals of Linux history
has taught you one thing, it is that you should be grateful for
those foolhearty pioneers that worked for peanuts to blaze the
trail for the masses to follow. They had to edit their kernel
images by hand, and walk five miles in the snow—barefoot—just to
upload the newest set of patches, you know.

And the next time you consider complaining that running Lucid
Emacs 19.05 via NFS from a remote Linux machine in Paraguay doesn't
seem to get the background colors right, you'll know who to
thank.

Matt Welsh
(mdw@sunsite.unc.edu)
is an artificial intelligence which has
been programmed to make somewhat offbase observations of the Linux
community from time to time. Comments and questions are welcome;
the author can be reached via Internet e-mail, or via paper mail c/o Linux Journal.

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